Overview
- A five-economist study released Monday drew on an unprecedented Restos du Cœur dataset covering 2018–2025 to track millions of individual visits and about 16 million anonymized data points from roughly 1,900 centres.
- The analysis shows a 37% rise in people served by the charity and a 62% jump in residential precarity between 2018 and 2025, with 5.5 million people using the service at least once over that period.
- Researchers estimate roughly one in ten French residents could face food precarity within the next decade and find that a 10% rise in unemployment is associated with about 13% more food precarity and 10% more residential precarity.
- Most beneficiaries are unemployed (about 90%) and use aid for a short spell on average (around 18 months) but 14% remain in long spells of poverty, and macroeconomic recovery alone does not meaningfully raise exit rates.
- The report calls for prevention through price stability, greater housing supply and labour-market measures plus early, targeted interventions for those already trapped in deep poverty, a message the charity is pushing ahead of next year’s presidential contest.